It’s good to think outside the pizza box

The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonca & Pizzaboy is “based on the award-winning graphic novel series published by Dark Horse, uncover the supernatural mysteries of Lisbon’s underworld.” (imdb)

If you are already a fan of the comics, you’ll really enjoy this game, but if the characters are unfamiliar, you might want to pass on it. One reviewer on steamcommunity.com said, “The game’s writing is consistently funny, but the voice actors don’t sell it especially well. The puzzles are reasonably clever, but they require some pixel-hunting to find all the pieces at times. The art is terrific, but with so much going on in every background it can be hard to identify objects that are actually important. The music is serviceable, but there isn’t enough of it.      It’s almost good… but not quite.”

On the same site, another reviewer referred to the game as “Sometimes good, sometimes just really annoying. Lots of time wasted because of repetitive long dialogues, items that are almost impossible to find or steps that are very hard to figure out. With too much trial and error, the quality of the gameplay is greatly lowered.” (Steam Community)

The game was created by Portugal’s Felipe Malo, who wears many hats. He is an accomplished jazz pianist who has played alongside many other professional musicians; he is a film director who has won several awards for his work; and he is a graphic novelist whose work on The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonca & Pizzaboy spans three volumes. He developed the video game version of those graphic novels with OKAM studios and funded it through a Kickstarter program back in 2016 and now it is available for play on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS.